There’s another way of thinking about this.
There is a large community of JS/ECMAScript developers. You might well have more success promoting an IF framework to JS devs than you will selling JavaScript to IF authors.
Likewise in the Python world. An Interactive Fiction library on PyPI with good examples and documentation would likely get more takeup among Python devs who fancy writing a piece of IF than among IF authors who decide to try Python.
Yeah, I fully understand that the best tool is the one you already know and the market would be for people who already know JavaScript. Asking someone who’s already fluent in Inform to learn another language is a big ask. I’m really not looking to convert anyone to a new tool. Just looking to create something new and interesting and hoping it finds an audience.
I’m wondering if all the people bouncing off Twine are only using the app? Most of the big Twine developers I know write in VSCode using Twee (and tweego for compilation). Writing Twee is much like writing CS or Ink, but with all the Twine customisability still available.
That sounds about right. And when I do encounter an unusable website it’s nothing to do with Javascript, it’s about security settings. Cross-site loading, CORS violations, etc. Basically the sort of privacy-related things that people want to use something like Brave for.
3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Customising/Reimplementing ChoiceScript
I’ve moved the ChoiceScript discussion to a new topic.
My post wasn’t actually related to ChoiceScript at all 
Okay, I moved it back. Hopefully that’s the last one though 
What are my thoughts on IF and browsers… well as someone who has spent a lot of time investing into online IF, I think the platform is incredibly capable! But there are also lots of weird edge cases and incompatibilities. Chrome is dominant, which is convenient in some senses, but we can’t let ourselves ignore the other browsers. Right now the browser that lags the most is Safari, and especially on iOS, where most of my headaches have come from.
I’ve spent a lot of time getting parser IF working well on mobiles (and screen readers, though I still haven’t learnt how to effectively test them myself.) So from my perspective it makes sense to consolidate on the one UI layer. Anyone making their own browser parser interface from scratch is going to discover there are a lot of nasty edge cases to handle.
While Glk can do a lot, it can’t do everything that people would like it to be able to do, and it can’t even handle all the formatting options that other old IF formats want to use. So I still have plans to implement my CSS extension proposal, and even later to add some kind of JS system, that would let you add Vorple-style changes within a standard Parchment interpreter. There’s just a lot else to do before I get there.
Does this mean that APIs, like bike racks, ought to be patentable?
I would disagree…
Surely the most likely adopters are people trying to integrate parser stuff into choice based games written in JS using Twine/Undum/Ink/etc.
Or perhaps that’s a naïve assumption.
That seems quite likely (speaking from the Twine side of the fence). Many Twine authors are essentially trying to invent their own open-world and world-models in games, with or without command parsers. If there was a good JS library just for that side of it, that could be dropped in to such games, I imagine it would have use.
That is also one of my projects. A customizable world model library in JS/TS where you can configure various parameters (health/combat systems, clothing systems, container model, etc). The nice thing is that the TS type system is actually powerful enough that all the configuration can be used to check things at compile time, and can be used to generate JSON schemas for necessary data (like item definitions).
Absolutely not. Software patents should never have been a thing.
Again, it isn’t the rack, but the slot.
Challenge accepted.
At least patents expire after 20 years. The copyright period is so long.
The thing with a lot of software patents is that there is often prior art that would invalidate them if one wanted to challenge the patent, but that would involve lawyers.
Agreed on all points. If I controlled copyright law, it’d be 10 years, never extendable, never transferable (not even via estate). After that it’s public domain.
In the US, the Copyright Act of 1790 originally set it at 14 years from publication, with the option to renew for another 14. I would be willing to settle for that.
I live at the command-line in a terminal window. I have great natural sympathy for the desire to not need a browser or electron app to run IF.
I also think that I’m very much in the minority on this and if someone made some compelling new framework that was getting others’ attention it would take about 15 minutes before people wanted to run it in a browser and style the output with CSS.
HTML/CSS is a sophisticated, mature framework for displaying text and I think better typography is a direction text-based games should go in. And they’re already well and widely known technologies, as is Javascript. And it’s well-known how to make something responsive and accessible with them. And it buys you that your game will automatically run on any remotely modern platform. (I have great love and respect for retro-gamers / retro-game devs but have no interest in yoking IF’s future to a retro-ox.)
So, personally, I think browser-based frameworks are the sensible avenue to pursue.
I’d be okay with the resumption of what the US had from 1831 through 1977, i.e., recently enough to overlap my lived experience: 28 years extensible once for another 28 years.
Really, my rough heuristic position on copyright is that anything a middle-aged adult can remember from their childhood, or anything that’s been around long enough to form a prominent part of the culture, should be public domain. It’s frankly unacceptable that major cultural phenomena like Batman, Star Wars, etc. are still under a government-enforced monopoly.
This. 
Personally, I like the idea of a flat life or 20 for allIP, be it copyright, patent, or Trademark. 20 years post first publication or upon the death of the creator, whichever comes first, a work of any variety enters the public domain. I’m also in favor of explicit protections for fanworks and post market modifications*. Also, the abolishment of the exorbitant patent fees that basically make it impossible for anyone without corporate backing to actually get world wide patents.
That said, a return to 28 years plus a second 28 years if the copyright holder can be bothered to renew the copyright sounds like a step in the right direction, and I could get behind a step down to 10 years.
Still, if I were suddenly crowned king, declaring everything published before the 21st century as public domain would be on my bucket list of start of reign proclamations.
More to the original topic, I couldn’t care less about how a game’s text looks and a terminal window is more GUI than I’d use voluntarily(I do all of my command lining from the Linux Console and only use a terminal emulator when I need to copy something from Firefox into the command line), but I could get behind GUI interpreters supporting styling via css or an extension to an existing story file standard to embed HTML/CSS styling. Still, I prefer the simplicity of just running a console interpreter that prints unformatted text to stdout, which espeakup, my console screen reader, reads automatically and which fits naturally with how espeakup handles screen review if I need to reread the last passage and where I can always immediately start typing the next command to a web interface where at best, I’m constantly leaving focus mode to search for the beginning of the latest output, have to manually tell Orca to read it, find the command box, and switch back to focus to type the next command. Granted, good use of HTML headings, horizontal rules/separators, etc. could make that jumping around only slightly inconvenient rather than an immersion breaking slog, but ignoring my gripes specific to the overuse of Javascript and other rich web content, I feel like for every web site that makes really good use of the page elements GUI screen readers can routinely use for quick navigation, there’s several that range from subpar to not used at all to actively frustrates page navigation. And ironically, or at least what people mistake for irony, it’s something that’s completely invisible to sighted web surfers since they can just scroll pass the parts of a page irrelevant to what they are doing and move their eyes between different sections of the screen without ever moving their cursor.